Philematology
by lifeundecided
Summary: She doesn't want to want to hold his hand.


_Author's note: I have made no time to write, and for that I am sorry. The holidays have allowed me a parcel of time, and I plan to make the most of it. _

She's off her food because everything tastes different once you've had someone else's tongue in your mouth, suffocated under the weight of a thousand fleeting moments of confusion and the sensation of lips between your teeth. She's drunk on a cocktail of spit and graceless lust, hands catching on hems and eyes open and bone against bone against bone. She wakes up to orange, cloying light that seeps in from open windows and reasons that she's sweating him out; that's why she can smell him in her sheets.

Her hand is a blur of yellow and black as she taps pencils against desks in rhythms that have a teacher's gentle hand placed firmly on hers, with a tight lipped whisper of "Miss Harmon." and a nod towards the door. Waiting room chairs are stiff and too warm from the residual heat of shame left behind by the chair's previous occupant; today's, a part time delinquent with a penchant for soft porn magazines and an exhibitionist streak. The elicit library he runs from his locker has a weekly turnover of fifty dollars, and she's more than once considered stealing his wallet and mailing the contents to a battered women's shelter. Porn offends her. She's not sure why.

When the principal finishes dialing her father's number there are several clipped pleasantries and poignant glances in her direction. Under the desk her fingers curl as if around a cigarette and she taps her foot against the carpeted floor. The sound is too low, too quiet, so she scrapes it back and forth, wearing down the rubber sole of boots dying a slow death in the form of daily trudges back and forth from school. She leaves fragments of shoe carcass in her wake. There are red roller blades in a store window that catch her eye, repressed lusting after material goods that are too kitsch and contrived manic-pixie-dream-girl-from-a-cereal-box. So she walks and drags her feet and wears down her left heel faster than her right because she slouches with the weight of a shoulder bag. She's ultimately practical, a two strap backpack kind of girl, but the bag was pseudo vintage, pseudo _her, _an olive branch that would have had to stretch from Boston to LA, if the choice had been hers. The choice was not, and choking down olives makes for an easier life, despite the occasional pip.

The file on the desk is slim, shipped from Boston, photocopied school reports in bland typeface and looping handwriting with perfect columns of A's on every page. And perfect columns of late demerits, detentions, letters home. Teachers hate her because she lacks drive, a passion for learning, whatever bullshit buzzwords the local authorities spit pretty for parents. What's more is she doesn't have to be driven to get places.

She's Matilda ten years later, if Miss Honey had turned out to be a psychotic ghost boy with a taste for SWAT bullets.

She's being dragged down a loophole by her ankles; they're thinking of kicking her out because she's failing Spanish. The row of boxes by her name is empty. She's never been to Spanish in her life. Her vocabulary extends to quesadilla, and of that she's proud. Russian would have been more useful, so she sips vodka in her back garden by way of peaceful protest after fifth period.

He'll sit beside her and offer a lighter and an ear as and when required.

Ben pulls up to the kerb and sits stoic and silent, face forward, but when she stubs out her cigarette on the dashboard he flinches. Her mother used to smoke. She stopped after the miscarriage.

He starts to talk about teen angst and all the swirl of hormones in her body and the terrifying prospect of change. There's a silence, all twisted mouths and suppressed laughter on her end. Camaraderie with her father even stretches to the fact that when all is said and done he doesn't give a shit about her education. They're too similar, and he's too wrapped up in getting his wife's affections back from the clawed clutches of a Scottie dog; he's a person before he's a parent.

Her mother is not. That's why for all her mother's riot grrrl glory days Violet is a teenager with a smoking habit, rather than a baggie of medical waste. And why her mother is supposed to be on some derivative of Prozac, but dumps 20mg down the bathroom sink every day. Violet watches on with an indifferent air punctured only by a lament for the waste of good medication.

She's been able to pick locks since the age of eleven when she developed an obsession with heists and cat burglars and the like. She wore all black and slipped through non-existent laser beams without tripping a single alarm. The diamond or the painting or whatever would be forever searing a hole in her back pocket or under her bed, too hot to sell on the black market just yet. Tate's files serve for bedtime reading and there's a hint of a smirk on her lips when she reads the very first transcript; her epiphany, at least, was based on a lot less gory detail than Ben had ever been given.

The bedroom she inhabits was dog eared on the realtor's glossy pamphlet, chosen especially for the young lady of the house: she's grateful for the stretch of corridor and the lock on the door that muffles the discordant thumps of her odd music, and the occasional creak of a bed spring under the ghostly weight of a ghostly boy, when he makes her mattress dip and runs cold fingertips over her cheekbones. The walls are blue and she wonders whether it was his choice of colour, or the efforts of an overzealous, overly optimistic past owner. She's willing to bet it's the latter, the strokes belonging to a resident he's cursed under his breath once or twice, using words like queen or faggot that make her bristle because she was born after he died and she's been brought up the right way.

She wonders where the baby would have slept, after the skin-to-skin days of milk on demand, whether she'd be kept up all night because of colic, or take late night, early morning road trips around the block to lull him to sleep, whether she'd have given him a brother in law at something dumb like age twelve, made him an uncle a fourteen, whether she'd have bought him booze and reminded him that it was ok to call their father an asshole because she called him much worse at his age.

She never cried for the lost boy because he wasn't even a bump, just a thought, a scan, a knowledge that there was something there because the doctors said so, even if her rational mind had its doubts.

There's salt water running into her ears as it slides sideways down from scrunched up lids, into her hair and onto her pillow. It'll be Halloween soon and Vivien would have had him dressed as a pumpkin or a ghost or something equally cute and appropriately themed. She was a lonely, sharp and selfish little girl, but it wouldn't be so much competition for her parents' affections rather than he'd have taken it off her hands, given her some space to concentrate on the trivial pursuit that is being a teenage girl.

She's never had a curfew or been grounded a day in her life, because now she barely leaves her bedroom. Delinquency comes to her, express delivery, from the depths of the basement to the safety and the darkness of her sheets.

Each day she skips class his smile gets brighter and he feels more solid when she's got one knee on either side of his torso and her hair gets in the way of all things sloppy and hazy and wonderful. When he tries to touch her over her leggings it jars with the image of him she has in her head, because he doesn't do it right, doesn't know where or how or the delicate, difficult ins and outs which make his canting hips and weighted gasps seem crude by comparison.

She's giving too much and she's too afraid to ask for anything more, afraid he'll take it as a green light or a declaration of love or something else that's glaringly obvious, exactly right, hidden behind flushed cheeks and the fact that the barbs and the glares and the slow burn of a cigarette can't nullify her purity, her tentativeness when it comes to all things unclean.

There are words she can't make her mouth form, and her reaching hands can't reach as far as she wants them to.

She stutters over a question, over a demand, over the possibilities of replies and the snarky comments which could make her blush, retract her words, end the 'fuck me' with a 'fuck you too.'

He knows where she keeps her razor blades and how she's convinced she'll die of cancer and the stupid justifications for her fears and phobias which mean that it's not cowardice but logic that keeps her away from things like heights and cats and the occasional wasp.

He knows that she's just a girl, as well as some other things that make her special or different or whatever wishy washy young adult romance bullshit requirements she fills to make them some sort of ultimate alternative power couple.

She never thought of herself as different because she's never known what it's like to be the same. She doesn't like the label because it cheapens whatever shred of individuality she's managed to salvage from eleven years of public school.

Nowadays she's reduced to doe eyes and witty comments with an undercurrent of need.

She's turned soft on the inside, liquiscent, all tepid water running down the inside of her skin, can't clench her fist, low blood sugar and quaking knees kind of soft.

In his abscence she hardens and wonders how she could let herself be so affected by a rush of chemicals and the pressure of less than deft hands on her skin. And she convinces herself that it's all for experimental purposes when she opens her arms and her mouth in a whisper.

"Tate."


End file.
